Add Mixtec language for Roma (2018)

Hi Peter -

Thanks for posting the additional links.  We do have an open ticket to include this missing language, however, there are system challenges that make adding these new additions more complicated, so these requests are still pending and will be added once our tech teams address the technical limitations.

I cannot imagine it would hurt that much to hard-code every real world language that has a significant presence in at least one well-known movie. Regardless, I might suggest using "Indigenous North American" instead of "North American Indian", for wherever it would be used to describe the languages spoken by people of tribes indigenous to anywhere in the Americas north of the Panama Canal.

There are already several specific indigenous languages listed, such as Navajo or Maya, so it should be possible to add more of them.

I'm also not sure North American Indian is the accurate term for a language originating in Mexico: "North American Indian languages, those languages that are indigenous to the United States and Canada and that are spoken north of the Mexican border."
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nort...

I get that there are not a lot of movies in Mixtec so you might not want to hard-code each of the hundreds of languages spoken in the Americas

I understand the point you're making, but I disagree. IMDb should record the language spoken in a film. Whether a language is only used in 1 film or in 1 million should not matter.

That being said, I think "North American Indian" is NOT a language nor a language group and should therefore be deleted from the database. Of course I could very well be wrong and a staff member can explain why it actually IS a language (or language family/group).

I second Marco's views above.

I submitted the change from North American to Central American based on the categorization found here, for instance, which groups Mexico with Central America rather than North America, linguistically speaking:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Amer...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Meso...

I agree it would be better to add Mixtec. Let's remember this was said to be a technical problem, not a policy decision.

For what it's worth: when watching the movie on Netflix in France, it uses 2 different subtitles: a standard one and one between brackets. At the very first occurrence, it states that the subs between brackets are for Mixtec...

http://remezcla.com/features/film/alfonso-cuaron-roma-interview-mixtec-subtitles/

It's Mixtec.  If this is a technological hurdle and takes a lot of work to update, then the goal is to be able to change it more easily to whatever it should be.  In six months if they ask to change it to Oaxaca it would be great if it wasn't so difficult.  But for right now the correct answer is Mixtec.

I also saw the language identified on screen as Mixtec (Mixteco).

It's true that it's described as a group of languages, but it may be the closest identification we have.

The language list already includes several groups of languages.

Regarding the different languages in a family, there is a Goverment institute in Mexico called INALI (Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas or National Institute of Indigenous Langauges) that considers 68 different languages spoken in Mexico.

Mixtec is one of them (the full list is here), and therefore it is valid to consider it as an independent language as that is the way it is officialy treated in Mexico.

Indeed there are regional variations, with different degrees of variations among them, and which indeed should be considered independent languages. But identyfing each of them is a titanic task that has not even been acomplished by academics in the country.

The case of Mixtec is the same as nahuatl, another Mexican indigenous language which actually refers to a group of similar tongues, but nahuatl is considered as a single language at the IMDb and Mixtec can be treated the same way.

Purepecha and Mayan are two other tongues in the same situation at the database.

If you want to add the specific Mixtec language spoken in the film, it is most likely Southwest Central Mixtec based on the fact that it is the language spoken in Tlaxiaco, the town were Yalitza Aparicio was born, and thus the one she would have learned, but I can't be 100% certain about this.

The name I'm giving in a literal translation from Spanish, but I have not found it called like that in any English source.
While Wikipedia claims the language spoken in Tlaxiaco is Ñumi Mixtec, this is not supported by the information given at INALI which I take as more reliable.

That very Wikipedia article says it's in a dialect continuum. The line between dialect and language is never clear because all languages are in constant change and diffusion. Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are essentially the same language from a linguistic/typological point of view, but are often treated as different languages for political reasons as are on IMDb, while the Arabic spoken in Saudi Arabia and that in Morocco are both treated as one language even though they may not be as mutually intelligible as, say, Spanish and Portuguese. The point is, the boundary is never clear and there is no way to be consistent about this; but IMDb has already admitted many broad classes of languages into the list of languages.

JasonL: "If this is a technological hurdle and takes a lot of work to update, then the goal is to be able to change it more easily to whatever it should be."

Couldn't agree more. Perhaps the right way to go is to make it possible to manually enter a language not available in the predefined set, just like in the occupation of a crew member.

I have seen that Mixtec has finally been added as a spoken language in Roma. Thanks

I see it too!  That is excellent news.  Great work all. 

Thank you IMDb!

I'm very happy to see that Mixtec has been added to Roma. If I click on it, I get to a page saying no titles have Mixtec listed as a language, but I guess that'll just take some time. (especially since I am using the old and semi-supported reference view).

If I click on it, I get to a page saying no titles have Mixtec listed as a language, but I guess that'll just take some time.

I still see this. (https://www.imdb.com/search/title?primary_language=qmt&title_type=feature). Do other people see this as well?

This seems to be because the link uses the primary_language operator, which only lists titles where that language is listed first in the language data.

The advanced title search now also includes Mixtec and instead uses the normal languages operator. Three titles are returned, including Roma:

https://www.imdb.com/search/title?lan...

This distinction between these two link types isn't documented anywhere to my knowledge, but I have noticed it before.

Thanks a bunch Peter, I did not know that.